Dear Friends,
I’ve put aside my planned podcast for today and have quickly written a response to Sunday night’s 2025 Grammy Awards show.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have watched it. Many times I turned away … frustrated …frequently leaving the room, but as an artist I wanted to to know what the leading awards show of contemporary music and its 12,000 voting members of the Recording Academy were selecting as the finest music of our contemporary culture.
As always, my friends, deepest thanks for joining me.
Pressing On!
D. Paul
The 67th Annual Grammy Awards—2025
For anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear, it is apparent America is in a massive moral collapse. The decline began, pundits say, with the “sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll” of the 60s, and it has accelerated at a staggering rate in the last ten years. One need look no further than to the 67th Annual Grammys for proof. They were pagan, highly politicized, and perverse in both content and presentation.
The entire show itself, with its half-naked stars and gyrating bodies, exhibited flagrantly the pagan side of our bifurcated culture, with its wanton exaltation of self and the flesh. Even when a couple of casual references were made to the “Man upstairs,” it was for a God who had helped the artists achieve their resounding “success.” Ah, it would appear the “prosperity gospel” is alive and well in the entertainment business.
A family member of mine, who sang backup on a recording by Puerto Rican musician, Residente, whose new solo album, “Las Letras Ya No Important,” won a 2025 Música Urbana Album Grammy, told me she passed on watching the show, describing it as a “spectacle.” A spectacle indeed, with a final, squalid performance that even left pop pundits and their platforms somewhat taken aback. Excuse me, dear reader, for this vivid description by E!NEWS of the marathon show’s final presentation:
Charli XCX helped closed out the ceremony…with a risqué performance from her 2024 album Brat…. Charli—who won Grammys for Best Dance/Electronic Album and Best Dance Pop Recording—strutted the stage in a blue lingerie set and fringe jacket while performing "Guess," even touching her crotch while singing the lyrics, "You wanna guess the color of my underwear." She then turned her back to the crowd and swayed her hips to reveal her backside to the lyrics, "Is it showing off my brand new lower back tattoo?" The 32-year-old…turned the Grammys into a big party on stage with backup dancers and friends getting wild as underwear rained down onto the stage…. And the crowd was eating it up. Billie Eilish, who features on the song, was seen swaying in the audience, while even Taylor Swift was spotted dancing with a champagne bottle.
“A risqué performance” and “…dancers and friends getting wild” sell short what was an orgiastic display worthy of the bacchanalian courts of Nero.
Gone, my friends, are the days when the Grammys were for everyone. Long, long gone are those days of Frank Sinatra, Henry Mancini, and Ella Fitzgerald, with their memorable melodies and lasting lyrics—all winners, by the way, of the 1st Annual Grammy Awards in 1958, along with The Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” and a Grammy Award to David Seville and the “Chipmunks," for the Best Recording for Children. Speaking of children, Sunday night’s Grammys aired on CBS at 8:00 pm, EST, 5:00 pm Pacific Time, still “family viewing-time” for much of the country, and no warning was given that some parents might find the upcoming material inappropriate for younger children. No—for all of their preening and sanctimonious posturing (after all, "We Are The Children of the World” they sang; one of the better songs of the night!), no consideration was given to the impact this marathon display of vulgarity might have on the impressionable minds of young children. No—this was a “wokefest” for the enlightened, and the younger they are enlightened, the better off the world will be, supposedly. Some might call it “grooming.”
As if to put an exclamation point on the evening’s festivities, rapper Kendrick Lamar, Grammy winner for both Record and Song of the Year, Not Like Us, assured a rapt audience that, “This is what it’s about, man, because at the end of the day, nothing more powerful than rap music. I don’t care what it is. We are the culture that’s gonna always stay here and live forever….” My brothers and sisters in Christ, I would show you the lyrics to Not Like Us, but they’re not fit to print.
And so where is the poet of decency and modesty, the prophet of alarm and warning, the bold priest and pastor declaring the supremacy of Christ in a collapsing culture, crying out for repentance and revival? Will the Church, either by its approval or reticence, be complicit in this massive, moral collapse? Will we, the children of God, live and act in ways that are counter to the prevailing culture? Or will we be swallowed up, assimilated, living lives of respectable timidity?
We have our warning: But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power( 2 Timothy 3:1-5 NIV).
And we have been given our marching orders, even as they were given as a “final charge” to Timothy by the Apostle Paul: You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings…. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus (2 Timothy 3:10-15).
Amen
“The Church’s One Foundation is Jesus Christ Her Lord!”
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